Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat weblog has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, info-tech and privacy/confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. The team is David Brophy, Birgit Clark, Merpel, Jeremy Phillips, Eleonora Rosati, Darren Smyth, Annsley Merelle Ward and Neil J. Wilkof. You're welcome to read, post comments and participate in our community. You can email the Kats here

For the half-year to 30 June 2015, the IPKat's regular team is supplemented by contributions from guest bloggers Suleman Ali, Tom Ohta and Valentina Torelli.

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Monday, 30 May 2011

The IPKat would like to take the opportunity to wish a Happy 40th Birthday to the Benelux Office for Intellectual Property (BOIP). Originally born as the Benelux Trade Marks Office on 1 January 1971, the BOIP is now a key player in the international intellectual property landscape, and more specifically, in the international registration systems for trade marks and designs administered by WIPO.

To commemorate the occasion, the BOIP published In Varietate Concordia?: National and European Trademarks living apart together. The work is collection of essays by well known authors on new problems in trade mark law:

The book is well worth reading (even with Babelfish translations if you are not fluent in all three languages) for the sustained treatment of trade mark issues arising at the national, community and international levels. It also has the honour of being the first book this Kat owns which comes with its own commemorative book box.

The IPKat notes some useful BOIP trivia: the Office itself claims the fastest trade mark processing times in the world and was ranked first in terms of overall performance in an international survey published by Managing Intellectual Property in May 2010. Merpel suggests that this trivia should give the UK’s IPO something to aspire to …
.Bibliographical details: hardback, pp 184, ISBN 978-90-811477-3-6. Available only if you are a friend of the BOIP, or a friend of a friend, it seems, since no purchase details are provided. Rupture factor: minimal. Bookcase show-off factor: high.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Please let me make up with two excellent Dutch thinker: Martin Senftleben: Trade Mark Protection – A Black Hole in the Intellectual Property Galaxy?, IIC 4/2011, and Wolfgang Sakulin, Trademark Protection and Freedom of Expression: An Inquiry into the Conflict between Trademark Rights and Freedom of Expression under European Law, Kluwer, 2011. The severe criticism against ECJ´s application of trademark law are quite convincing.

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